Ethics, Obedience and Heroism

Hello.

My name is Doctor in Bogota and I am the

assistant professor of social psychology at the University of Birmingham.

Today I'm going to be talking to you about the

ideas of contemporary applications and investigations of social psychology,

mostly focusing on bad behaviour.

So prejudice, behaviour that could be bad, like obedience and the flip side.

Good behaviour, heroism.

What we're going to do in this course is what we're going to.

We're going to talk about how hard it is to actually even research these topics.

We're going to move on to a discussion

about how current research differs from older research,

both ethically and practically.

We're going to discuss classic studies and recent studies on being a hero.

And then we're going to discuss how we can use

our understanding of social psychology to understand pro social activity,

focusing on theories of pro social behaviour and, using our knowledge,

investigate a big recent event in the past few years using theories.

Understand it.

Remember,

a theory is a collection of of knowledge that

is based on a series of research together.

So we say the theory of gravity.

In this context, it's not just a hypothesis It's a theory.

So to start, though, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to describe a scenario.

I want you to put yourself in the shoes of this person.

You are walking down the street,

you turn a corner and you see a group of people wearing racist insignia,

apparently beating a child of a different race.

Before you can react.

Though, a person runs in,

grabs the child and just ran and just takes off to protect them.

Clearly, they don't know them. They clearly have no relation.

They see it, they grab them and they run. You're horrified. Of course.

You pull out your phone, you dial 999.

And before you press call Wow, a bunch of cameras come out.

Lab assistants walk out and lab suits and they're clapping.

And the person who grabbed the child is confused.

Wait, What's happening? Am I getting pranked? Congratulations.

You've done a wonderful job.

This was a test by Columbia University in the US, uh,

to see how people could be heroes in the contemporary event.

We were replicating a previous study.

Okay, fine. You You feel a lot better. Cool.

You go home, you start thinking wait a second.

That was

unethical. Maybe

that study must have been traumatising

for everyone. For myself. I'm I'm feeling really traumatised.

Like I saw something that was horrific. I saw a racist attack on a child.

You're shaken. And what about the guy who who saved this child?

What about the guy who went in, grabbed this child and ran

Did How do they feel?

And this child may be an actor. But how does that work?

And you think about the lab assistance.

They must have known it was wrong, but they were obeying the rules.

They were listening. They must have known this.

They if they're psychologists, they must have known that something wasn't right.

But they obeyed someone. They obeyed someone to do this study

that clearly could have been who could have gone really badly.

It could have been that person.

Let's say, for example, that person, instead of grabbing the child and running,

they could have pulled a knife and started stabbing those people.

They must have known it was wrong. They obeyed a very, very negative thing.

And then you think about the look of determination,

that hero that person they chose to help.

It's a mob of people wearing racist insignia. They had great personal risk

and they couldn't have known they would have gotten away, but they did it anyway.

So you have in summary ethics. You have obedience and you have heroism.

And these are all tied to social psychology and how we do research.

By the end of this course, you'll have a framework to understand these concepts.

These questions.

We won't be focusing too much on the ideas of prejudice and obedience,

but rather we will be focusing more on contemporary research,

conducting research and our ideas around these.

But first, before we do that, we have to talk about ethics.

We talk about how we get our information,

how and when we apply it and move on to a discussion of heroism and heroism research.

Let's, however, make sure

that we're on the same page, and this is a key definition.

So we are talking about the right things in the right way.

Prejudice

is a deep dislike of another person

based on their group membership, and is comprised of a feeling

a negative generalisation, also known as a stereotype,

and they're an intent to act against this

obedience is where an individual

follows the orders or request of another because they happen

to have authority or some form of standing over others.

And ethics is basically a system of understanding what is right and what is wrong,

what is actually good and what is not.

And this I know it's sort of more related to morality,

but basically it's about it has a utilitarian perspective, that is,

Are we doing the most good against a

negative situation or potentially just a neutral situation?

This is where our course is going to explore.

We're going to talk about ethics next, but we're also going to talk about heroism.

We're going to talk about prejudice a little bit.

We're going to talk about obedience.

This stuff is all intertwined,

interconnected and against the applications of social psychology.

With that, we're going to move on to ethics to start